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THE ORIGIN of the OLD ENGLISH DIALECTS REVISITED By

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THE ORIGIN of the OLD ENGLISH DIALECTS REVISITED By THE ORIGIN OF THE OLD ENGLISH DIALECTS REVISITED by Frederik Kortlandt - Leiden Did the Old English dialects fIrst diverge in Britain or on the Con­ tinent? In an earlier study (1986) I argued that neither view is correct and that the early divergences between West Saxon and Kentish on the one hand and Anglian on the other are the result of a chronological difference between two waves of migration from the same dialectal area in northern Germany. I argued that West Saxon has preserved two structural archaisms, viz. the nom.pI. ending of the ö-stems -a and the reflex re of PIE *e, whereas Anglian has retained fIve accidental irregularities which are also found in Old Norse, Gothic or Old High German. Besides, Anglian differs from West Saxon as a result of seven innovations shared with continental West Germanic languages: the substitution of the acc.pI. ending of the ö-stems -e for the nom.pI. ending, the creation of a distinct accusative of the 1 st and 2nd sg. personal pronouns, the creation of the 1st pi. possessive pronoun asa, the introduction of e-vocalism in the acc.sg. form of the masc. demon­ strative pronoun, the creation of 1st sg. beom 'am', the spread of *waljan to the paradigm of the verb 'will', and the raising of re to e. I therefore distinguished between an earlier, "Saxon" invasion which resulted in theconquest of Kent and Sussex in the fIfth century and a later, "Anglian" invasion which can be connected with the subjugation of the north starting around the middle of the sixth century. The shared innovations of Anglian and Old Saxon point to geographical contiguity after the early, "Saxon" migration. Reconsidering the relative chronology of Anglo-Frisian sound changes, Robert Fulk arrives at the following conclusion for the Northumbrian dialect of Old English (1998: 153): 1. Backing and nasalization of West Gmc. a, a before a nasal con­ sonant. 2. Loss of n before aspirant, resulting in lengthening and nasalization of the preceding voweI. 46 3. Fronting of West Gmc. a, ä to re, ~, inc1uding a in the diphthongs ai and au. 4. Palatalization (but not yet phonemicization of palatals). 5. Retraction of re, ~ to a, ä due to the influence of neighbouring consonants. 6. Non-Saxon (and Frisian) ~ > e. 7. Restoration of a before a back vowel of the following syllable; at this time (ceu was retracted to au in Old Frisian. 8. Breaking; in West Saxon, palatal diphthongization follows. 9. i-mutation, followed by syncope; Old Frisian breaking follows. 10. Phonemicization of palatals and assibilation, followed by second fronting in part of West Mercia. 11. Smoothing and back mutation. In this chronology, English and Frisian begin to diverge at stage 5 and tend to diverge widely at stage 7. The main difficulty with Fulk's chronology is the unmotivated cha­ racter of the sound changes: we find backing at stage 1, fronting at stage 3, backing at stage 5, fronting at stage 6, backing at stage 7, fronting at stage 9, and backing at stage 11. What was the driving force behind these alternating developments? Following Krupatkin's observation that "every time the initial shifts in the field of the long vowels raised similar transformations in the field of the short vowels" (1970: 63), we may look for structural pressure as a determinant factor. In my view, the basic element is the Proto-Germanic asym­ metry in the low vowels between long front ~ and short back a, which could be resolved either by fronting a to re, as in Anglo-Frisian, or by backing ~ to ä, as in the other languages (except Gothic, where ~ was raised to e at an early stage). If ;ß had been retracted to ä in West Germanic already, the Anglo-Frisian fronting would be entirely un­ motivated. Moreover, Caesar refers to the Swabians as Suebi, not **Suäbi, which shows that we must reconstruct a front vowel for an early stage of Old High German. I therefore think that West Saxon ~ is an archaism and that the early retraction of ~ to ä did not reach Anglo-Frisian. Hans Nielsen lists three reasons for the assumption that ~ was first retracted to ä and then fronted to ~ in Anglo-Frisian (1981: 52f.). First of all, "the development of Gmc. * -en, -em > OE/OFris. -ön, -öm could hardly have taken place except by way of *-än, -äm". Secondly, .
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